Graham Burchell: Featured Poet

RISOTTO
The room is drizzled with languages:
Italian, English, Spanish, German.
Each works next to the other
like the ingredients of comfort food
or strands of melody
made contrapuntal.

Gian has given a masterclass
in the cooking of risotto.
Now it sits inside us, beans, rice,
finely-chopped onion and salami
all drenched in a broth of carrot
with celery.

Like a triangle played in a scherzo,
bottle glass kisses wine glass. Wine
glugs, shows its age at its rim.

A joke follows in Italian,
and a smack of laughter precedes
a toast to amici – friends.

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Graham Burchell was born in Canterbury and now lives in Dawlish, Devon. In between he has lived and worked as a teacher or poet in England, Wales and seven locations overseas: Zambia, Saudi Arabia, Tenerife, Mexico, France, Chile and the United States. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. His collection ‘Vermeer’s Corner’ was published by Foothills Publishing in the United States in 2008. His new collection, ‘The Chongololo Club’ will be published by Pindrop Press in June 2012. He has won, been placed, commended or short-listed in many poetry competitions, including Poetry on the Lake, the Templar Prize, the Plough Prize and the Lorca in England international translation competition. He frequently gives readings and runs poetry workshops in the West Country and beyond. http://www.gburchell.com//.

A Heron in Buenos Aires

A Heron in Buenos Aires (Ravenna Press) is the latest collection from Argentinean poet Luis Benitez and comes after a long stream of impressive books: nine poetry collections, two essays and two novels, published in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela and this one, in America. It is edited by Beatriz Olga Allocati in association with translators Veronica Miranda and Cooper Renner.

In this, his first collection since 2005, he examines the cosmos: the place of humans, plants and animals within it; power and acceptance.

“From the back of time an animal is watching me:
it knows what I write because before I existed
it was already a name. It is the aurochs.
It daydreams the one will take it for a bull.
Sometimes it is a bird, a river, the wind
and sometimes something that leaves huge drops of blood
in the boughs and a footstep
going away, solid, invisible.”    The Aurochs

His is a world where humans, plants and animals co-exist: he communes with them; observes them but he does not want to rule them.
“I swam to that place where
you neither love nor hate,
you merely float over an eternal present,
and everything you see is your contemporary:”

He leaves us at the end of The Pearl Fisherman, the first poem in the collection, with:

“Those who are afraid of the shore
do not know they are walking on the sea.”

and this is something that resonates through the book, as if it is a warning that to uncover truth we must take risks.

Throughout the collection he looks at the cosmos as a stranger might, examining every aspect of existence. His eye is critical, discerning, his record of these meetings profound:
“Into the lives of others like a migratory face
we enter with violence, or caution,
aware of being the field which others cross.”

He goes on to say:

“We can’t retain anything nor nobody;
each glance is the pavement of the way we’re going.
When everything stays put, He will say that He has arrived.”   The Foreigner

This is an intelligent selection of poems where at times he is a witness to events, at other times his poems are empirically based on the evidence of his senses. It is a short collection of just 32 poems but it is filled to the brim.

Will Kemp: Featured Poet

 After my father died  

I sat on the bed in my shorts and vest
the way he would sometimes do,
an ocean of darkness outside.    

His laboured breathing still there
from the afternoon, times too he taught me
how to ride a bike, swim, bat, pee –

or recalled flying bombers in the war, 
his vow to marry my mother, getting into
Cambridge from a northern grammar. 
  
But never the Depression before:
people laughing as he shovelled droppings
behind a cart loaded with scrap, 

his dad with the reins, always coughing; 
all working back to the morning
it stopped – news he was told

in front of his class – the allotment shed
spattered with blood, the note
he was never allowed to read,

and what he must have felt going to bed
that night, the dark sky without a star,
a boy in a world all at sea. 

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 Will Kemp studied at Cambridge and UEA before working as an environmental planner in Canada, Holland and New Zealand.  He has been published in various journals and well-placed in national competitions. 
In 2012, he won the Cinnamon Poetry Award and Envoi International Poetry Competition in 2010. 
His first collection, Nocturnes, has just been published by Cinnamon Press.  His second collection, Lowland, will be published by Cinnamon in 2013.  

 
Nocturnes: Review by Susan Richardson

Kemp consistently delights and surprises with his ability to invent fresh and resonant images for darkness, the moon, the stars, while the range of tones – from the humorous depiction of the restive insomniac mind to the restrained grief expressed following the death of the poet’s father – is equally impressive.  It is, however, Kemp’s brilliant evocation of different nightscapes, the focus on sound when visuals are diminished and the degree to which the dark sharpens and enhances memories, that make this collection especially compelling.

 
 

 

Caroline Carver Tikki Tikki Man

Carver’s Tikki Tikki Man is her fourth collection, coming after Jigharzi An Me (Semicolon Press), Bone-fishing (Peterloo Poets) and Three Hares (Oversteps Books); an impressive track record.

It is hard to know where to start this review; her collection is like nothing else around. It tells the story of two children on the road to recovery after suffering abuse at the hands of the Tikki Tikki Man, “- perhaps when I’m grown up” says Maia “I’ll stop remembering.” At one point when the Tikki Tikki Man goes back to his ship the children tell us

“we wrap our guilt into small bundles
hide them in cupboards
hope cockroaches will find and eat them.”

At times the images are violent as the children try to deal with their pain. Maia “hacks at the hair which reaches to her waist / tears it from her head till her scalp’s bleeding” because she is told, with hair like that, “someone’s going to rape you”.

It is disturbing without being overly explicit; it’s also menacing and heart-breaking. Carver’s language is measured; every word has its place and impact. Within this cruel world Carver still manages to capture the beauty and light of landscapes, “I longed for autumn / so I could gather up mushrooms / put them to dry on the tops of saplings” and tells us the children’s dreams:

“Maia says she dreams of the wolf
trotting the height of land     like a warrior king

he’s made from the earth    he’s part of the earth
he’s a family man   he has his tribe close by”.

Tikki Tikki Man is an astonishing read.

Bethany Pope: Featured Poet

Pomegranate

Naked and crouched on nubbly carpet,
Between Leesha’s rough knees,
I can feel the fabric of her shorts,
Slick, cheap, donated; behind them the couch,
Gummed over from too many bodies.

Leesha is talking, although not to me.
Jerry Springer is on, his early incarnation,
The guest is a fat man, Bacchus like, bearded,
He has married his ass, has
Made a special ring, to close round the hoof.

Leesha’s fingers, horn colored, move through
The raveled skein of my hair, drawing
Out tresses, occasionally humming, prayer-chanting
Down in her throat. The narrow comb moves, parting hairs,
Removing the shells of incipient lice. Six fall to my knee.

My legs are bald, parted before me,
My clothes in a wad, to bleach in the sink.
The refrigerator has a padlock on the door.
The kitchen is locked, closed against light.
I think about monkeys. If I were one,
Leesha could feed me the food I have grown.

She rinses the comb in the bowl by her feet,
The one which smells of urine and water.
Her feet are bare, ashen, I look at her toenails.
‘Girl, if I could grow your hair.’, her tongue, red, clucking.
She turns on the clippers. Tooth broken. Chattering.

At my feet, a consummation. Hair falls,
Brownish, scab colored, smelling of blood,
The air on my scalp. Why did she comb it?
The hair on the floor, suddenly dead, everything,
Dead. All of that life lost, to no cause
And no one is eating.

Cloth bleached too long loses its weave. Threads cut
Bind nothing. The weft of the carpet raises a rash,
Too much flesh dust, not enough washing, I add to it
My own, wondering, how long it takes
A hair to decay out of half-life.

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Bethany W. Pope is a UK-based writer originally from the Southern United States. She has lived in North Carolina, Scotland, the Philippines, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, Kansas, Texas, and Wales before settling in her current home in Wiltshire. She lived in an orphanage for three years before dropping out of high-school, but later continued her education at Mary Baldwin College where she earned her BA in English Literature. She went on to earn her Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from University of Wales Trinity Saint David and her PhD in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University. Her first book, A Radiance is to be released by Cultured Llama in June, her second collection Persephone in the Underworld is to be published by Rufus Books.

Clare Best reviews Snow Child

Abegail Morley’s first collection How to Pour Madness into a Teacup, a winner of the Cinnamon Press Poetry Collection Competition and shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection prize, was always going to be a hard act to follow.

With the very smart Pindrop Press edition of Snow Child, Morley has gone for a swift second collection (published just two years after How to Pour Madness into a Teacup) which bears the same hallmark of emotional power. Snow Child again demonstrates that this poet is a force to be reckoned with.

Running to sixty-three pages of poems, the collection could seem in need of some pruning, but part of the message of Morley’s work appears to me to be its protracted nature. She has a way of approaching her subjects from several different angles, and the resulting layers of emotion, the build-up of impressions, the accretions of weight, are central to the effect of the collection as a whole.

The poems describe and inhabit a state of super-sensitivity (this term is more aware of a need for covering than the word ‘rawness’, though that word is tempting). It is manifested in ‘Angler’ as the skinned fish with eyes that “solidify and chink on the plate”. It appears in ‘Family Album’ as a yearning: “At the end of the darkness is the thread of my child./ I carry the weight of the dead”. It re-emerges in ‘Northern Line’ as “a disembodiment,/ a straining to replace nothing with something”. This super-sensitivity, questing comfort and seldom finding it, gives the poems their urgency and provides their uniformity of tone and drive.

Many of the poems focus on loss of one kind and another. Often the loss seems predatory, ineluctable, as in ‘Wasps’:

By now you’re 50 miles away at the Dartford Tunnel,
thrumming your way through. Here my skull’s stuffed

with wasps bashing their wings, wedged between
bone and skin. Soon their humming stops.

The loss is generally associated with menace, violence, the potential for more loss, making the compound effect of the collection hefty. In ‘Knoll Beach’, the speaker not only envisions the subject of the poem “slumped like sculpted rock … shoulders slack inside your coat” but shows layer after layer of loss – words shifting their balance, rocks breaking and opening “like scars, thin/ white lines bruising blue then mauve”. Until, finally “your body’s gone/ and all that’s left is the yell of gulls”.

The more loss there is at work in the poems themselves, that is to say the more the poet strips them down, the more effective and affecting they become, and in one of my favourites, ‘Sea’, everything depends on the last word, the possibilities it offers. Here is the whole poem:

I hang seaweed on a doornail.
It is psychic, predicts all manner of things.

My weather glass, my barometer of change,
it keeps away spirits and fire.

I know its air-bladders are mouths
and they talk of nothing but rain

when I pass. I hear their whispers.
I wait for the sun to die.

Pursing my lips and whistling across the sea,
I bring home the wind, the tide turns.

These are determined poems – their bleak beauty will hollow out a place in you, and will rest there.
Buy Snow Child here.

Clare Best‘s poems are widely published in magazines including The Rialto, The London Magazine, Magma, Resurgence, Agenda and The Warwick Review. A chapbook, Treasure Ground (HappenStance 2009), resulted from her residency at Woodlands Organic Farm on the Lincolnshire fens. Breastless – poems from the sequence Self-portrait without Breasts with photographs by Laura Stevens – came out with Pighog in 2011, and Clare’s first full collection, Excisions, was published by Waterloo Press, also in 2011. She teaches Creative Writing for Brighton University and the Open University, and lives in Lewes, Sussex. Visit Clare’s website here.

Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21: Kathleen Jones

  Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 (Templar Poetry, 2011) is Kathleen Jones’ first full poetry collection. Her pamphlet, Unwritten Lives won the Redbeck Press Pamphlet Award and this collection was joint winner of the Straid Collection Award.

Jones is known to me more as a biographer of literary women – Christina Rossetti, Katherine Mansfield, Margaret Forster, Catherine Cookson and the sisters, wives and daughters of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. In Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 Jones combines her skill as a literary historian with that of poet and pours for us poetry of time, place, departures, deaths and abandonment, in a weathered landscape that is at times a physical place, Carrock, Orton Scar or Murmansk, and at others a metaphysical one.

As a biographer Jones shows us 15th century Elsinore and tells us of Tycho de Brahe, an astronomer, who “translates the whirling heavens / to spheres of wood and brass” and has “stayed too long at court / neglecting to relieve himself / until his body had forgotten how” (Facing Elsinore). In this poem Jones writes “I have written it down / as he told me” and it is from this root that the collection spreads; from a love of storytelling, of character and situation.

What speaks to me most is the language of nature: she gives us “perpetual arctic ice” (Aiming for Archangel: Lake Onega), “snowlight hollows” (The Silence of Snow) where single “notes glitter like frost” and she invites us to listen “to the quiet significance of the moment” (Listening to Glenn Gould on Orton Scar) and watch “as the dusk / begins to smudge the trees” (Afraid of the Dark). She presents places where “the falling sun herds / us into the longest night” (Winter Light) and “cottages are fallen stone / and the roofless church / has a congregation of nettles” (Above Middleton).

Her characters are wide ranging: from her past she brings Uncle John whose hair is “crumbed with snow”, her mother whom she holds “delicately, conscious / of the thinness of skin, the brittleness of bone” and she speaks with an honesty that captivates, as she tell us of a mother/daughter relationship:

“Now the telephone’s umbilical line
is all that connects us; travelling
sound across oceans like
whale music”.             (Whale Music)

From history she brings us Elizabeth whose womb is “dry as a winter gourd” and tells us not only of de Brahe, but also of Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Millais and Morris, of bookplates and people’s fates, of hands touching through glass and children who are left behind.

In the title poem Jones writes “I walk away with his absence”. There is loss too for the reader at the end of this collection – loss that is tangible, that fills rivers with its emptiness. Jones is a lyrical storyteller and these stories rush at the pace of a current that is strong and rapid.

Maria McCarthy: Featured Poet

Slipping down

Boxing Day, and when asked what you ate
for Christmas dinner you say,
‘I should remember’.

You are slumped in a high-backed chair,
covered with a name-labelled blanket:
someone else’s.

We are told that at the Christmas party
you boomed out the unerasable hymns,
rallied the others to sing.

Today you remember your daughter’s face,
not her name; and of your son you inquire,
‘Have we met?’

You search my face much longer than you
would have thought proper if you were not
as you are.

I am introduced, again, as ‘Rob’s friend.’
You scan from son to daughter,
and back again,

the half-formed thought refusing to set
like jelly made with too much water,
and you shout, ‘I’ll have to think about that.’

You’ve slipped further in your seat,
as your grandson does when watching TV.
Now it’s Roger Moore as James Bond and

the woman in the red sweater wanders
in front of the screen and demands,
‘Does anyone know what’s supposed to happen?’

Your hands are bony thin; your thumbnail
thickened like a split hoof; and as you slip further
your shirt breaks free from belted trousers.

I have seen old photos, tie and jacket,
dapper. A care worker says
‘We do put a tie on him,’

‘But there’s health and safety to consider.
Joggers, that’s what they need
when they get like that.’

Your skinny bottom changed by day
from too-loose pyjamas
to baby rompers.

Time to sit up for the latest snack: soup,
two triangles of bread and ham.
You are lifted by three tabarded women,

one at each arm, a third at your waist.
You growl as you are raised.
You want to be left to slip down.

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Maria C. McCarthy writes poetry, short fiction and memoir, and has also written and broadcast as a columnist for BBC Radio 4’s Home Truths. Her first poetry collection, strange fruits, is published by Cultured Llama and WordAid to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support. She writes in a shed at the end of her garden in a village in North Kent. Her website is www.medwaymaria.co.uk

‘Slipping Down’ is published in strange fruits available from www.culturedllama.co.uk

Malcolm Carson reviews Snow Child in Other Poetry

Abegail Morley, Snow Child, Pindrop Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-9567822-4-3, £8.99

Morley is a real talent. She combines that rare gift of forensic self-scrutiny with an absence of self-pity, of being able to convey a richness of emotional experience through a punctilious use of imagery. One example here in full:

In the story I’m dreaming of Pickwell Lake
when it’s dark and only a squat of light
hunches at the far side.

He holds me up,
rubs my scales, fins, gills, whispers
to me whilst looking at the sky

and pressing me in grubby fists,
weighs me, pound for pound.

He takes a skinning knife – I’m tiny-boned;
bone on thin boniness. Later, my eyes
solidify and chink on the plate.
(Angler)

Here Morley exploits the image of the fish as victim to its extreme, a catch, just as a lover devoured callously in a relationship. This is beautifully clinched with the eyes which ‘solidify and chink on the plate’, devoid now of life, almost as currency.

The disturbing nature of a range of relationships is explored with the same meticulous craft. ‘Snow child’ itself is one such example where a child is mourned before its birth, yet perversely it has the ability to ‘spit my name’ and have ‘a possessing smile’. Bizarrely the ‘child’ is both ‘warm’ and ‘too cold. / The ice found you – / it erased your fingerprints.’

The inexactness of what is happening is, ironically, part of the compelling nature of this and many others of Morley’s poems, and reinforces the disordered emotional world she describes. There are, however, others where the pattern is more decipherable such as ‘The Letter’ where she traces the spit on an envelope to a lover through to the café where he stirs his tea and pays, and the washer-upper ‘stirs bubbles in the sink, washes me away.’ However whimsical a notion, this fits well with other poems dealing with annihilation such as ‘Breaking up’ in which a lover steals letters from her name until ‘When he starts on the vowels, / she’ll disappear completely.’

Comparisons with Plath inevitably arise but Morley is her own poet. There is a confidence in the way she handles her themes that defies any dependence on others as in ‘Manic episode’, for instance, where the persona is reassured that

You’ll get through, they say. Just wait.

And I’m clawing at my hands,
just blood and sinew telling each other stories:
a hand-me-down of cells
and secrets of sins.

The waiting to come through culminates in more surreal images:

I breathe on mirrors, steal eggs from the chickens,
hold them up to the sun waiting for lungs
to lunge with new air and for lips
to snap open.

Soon, they say. Soon.

But all is not about the destructive aspect of relationships. There are some beautiful love lyrics such as ‘Make me love you’ and ‘Your best side’ as well as the marvellous ‘Moved in’ where she has a different take on romance:

Now he he’s here, he’s pissing me off….
I fancy launching him like a rocket.
I’d be Crete to his Icarus – propel him to the sun.

Space prohibits me from going further. Suffice it to say, read it or better still, buy it and read it.

Sharon Black: Featured Poet

Unborn

(after Iona)

It’s how I pictured you
– marram-blond, naked of trees,
your fingers steeped in sand,

lying on a sea-blue blanket, swaddled
in soft grey clouds and sky,
joined to me by bedrock.

You were always going to be the gentle one.
Above the abbey, white pigeons
write your name in cursive script;

waves flutter high upon the beach,
all thoughts of blue suddenly interrupted;
luminous green pebbles shed themselves in the bay.

You came to me too late – me, the mainland,
already with whole civilisations to support,
my head was full of earth and clouds.

At the hospital they said your stone
had been warming for five weeks.
I swallowed pills; you washed away.

Today I leave you again, on the ferryboat to Mull –
in its wake, an umbilical cord of froth
connecting the islands –

and when I turn at Fionnphort you are
small enough to fit in my hand
as if you had simply floated to the surface,

as if you were simply sleeping on the horizon
of someone else’s palm.

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Sharon Black is originally from Glasgow but now lives in the Cévennes mountains of southern France with her husband and their two young children. In her past life she was a journalist and taught English in France and Japan. In her current one she runs a small retreat and organizes creative writing holidays (www.abricreativewriting.com). Her poetry has been published widely in journals such as Agenda, Aesthetica, Envoi, Iota, Mslexia, Orbis, The Frogmore Papers and The Interpreter’s House. She won The Frogmore Prize 2011, The New Writer Competition 2010 for Best Poetry Collection and Envoi International Poetry Prize 2009. Her first collection, To Know Bedrock, is published by Pindrop Press. www.sharonblack.co.uk